PhD Courses

PhD Courses Descriptions 2025-2026

Note: 600-level indicates MA, 800-level indicates PhD. Several courses are offered to both MA and PhD students.

PhD-Only Courses FALL

FMST 804 Seminar in Film and Moving Image Culture: Borders, Displacement, and Media

Instructor: Farah Atoui
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

Migration struggles are a global struggle against capital and empire. The logics of border formation and structures of displacement traverse seemingly disparate geographies to expel, immobilize, exploit, and criminalize historically marginalized communities including migrants, refugees, the undocumented, Indigenous and Black people, and People of Color. While bordering practices take different forms—such as fabricated migration crises in Europe, anti-Black carcerality in the US, colonial infrastructures in Palestine, export processing zones in Mexico, and urban gentrification in Canada—they all are, to quote writer and activist Harsha Walia, “the scaffolding for ordering regimes that simultaneously manufacture and discipline surplus populations while parasitically extracting land, labor, and life itself.” Put differently, bordering practices are not limited to the nation-state, but should be located within broader systemic forces that maintain and reinforce a racialized global system of subjugation, dispossession, and exploitation through forced im/mobilization.

The course engages with this global perspective on bordering practices as violent mediators of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism through the lens of film and moving image studies, anchoring the analysis of border struggles within film and art practices as well as processes of mediation from the Global South. Rather than focusing on border spectacles emerging from Western sites of media and knowledge production, we will begin from the get-go with counter-visual media interventions that expose the logics, formation, and function of borders, and present counter-narratives, counter-images and counter-histories that oppose the ones produced by contemporary media regimes to shape public imaginaries.

FMST 806 Proseminar l: Film in the Postcolonial Condition

Instructor: Luca Caminati
Monday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course traces the historical trajectory of debates on geopolitics as a method of analysis in film and media studies from the 1950s to the present. It begins with discussions on political cinema during decolonization, focusing on European militant films inspired by liberation movements. The course then examines the theoretical and methodological frameworks of Third (World) Cinema, its global impact, and its solidarity responses. While the primary goal is to familiarize students with the genealogy of Third-Worldism and Postcolonial Studies in Film and Media studies, the course also encourages them to reflect on how these concepts can inform their pedagogical practices. Through experiential learning—teaching, curating, proposing, and presenting—students will engage with these critical issues in practical ways.

PhD-Only Courses Winter

FMST 803 Seminar in Film & Moving Image Theory: Trans and Queer Time and Space

Instructor: Cael M. Keegan
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

Course will explore how screen media organizes our common sense(s) of the spatiotemporal order and how queer and transgender media producers and audiences have engaged the screen arts to break, resist, expand, reorder, or escape the logics of chrononormativity and compulsory spatial form. The course will cover major theories of space and time from cinema and media studies, phenomenology, critical race studies, and queer theory and transgender studies, with the aim of illustrating how screen media constructs and reconstructs the order of time and space along white, straight, cis, colonial trajectories—and how queer and trans phenomenologies offer new ways to conceptualize spatiotemporal reality. Goals of this course are to assist students in thinking critically about time and space as constructed by various media forms and to better understand queer and transgender phenomenologies as not only sexualized or gendered identities, but as life instances that require different spatiotemporal approaches to mediation.  

Combined MA/PhD Courses Fall

FMST 622/822 Topics in Digital Media: Global Streaming Cultures

Instructor: Ishita Tiwary
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

Scholarship on SVOD platforms has primarily focused on US-based services (Netflix), English-language markets, and West European/North American users. When non-Western countries are considered, their differences are often viewed through the category of nation. This narrow focus leads to generalizations that overlook the diverse production and consumption practices present in the global majority. Rather than remaining in research silos of nation-based case studies, this MA seminar will focus on studying various contexts (US, Korea, India, Turkey, Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, Central and Eastern Europe) to identify other configurations across cultures and to redraw the global in media industry studies. The global here is defined not in a federated sense but as direct to consumer across a multi territory market. The course aims to develop new insights into global SVOD platform economy that is often obscured by conventional knowledge based on US focused experiences. It will so by providing a nuanced understanding of the functioning of SVOD platforms and content beyond the category of the national and by placing different contexts into conversations with each other.

FMST 635/835 Topics in Aesthetics & Cultural Theory: Sensory Media Ethnography

Instructor: Josh Neves
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course combines audiovisual practice with critical approaches to digital media. Drawing on sensory ethnography, among other forms of documentary research and creation, we will (i) examine sensory ethnographic film, video, and other artworks; (ii) consider key debates in ethnography, documentary, and nonfiction research/practice; (iii) participate in weekly labs focused on video shooting, sound recording, editing, and related skills. The course will draw on approaches from a number of fields, including cinema and media studies, anthropology, urban studies, and critical social theory, as well as genealogies of documentary and experimental media. Students will create their own sound/video work and write a critical essay addressing key questions related to sensory/media ethnography. [*In addition to our weekly course meeting, students are required to participate in regular lab/training sessions on Friday afternoons in the GEM Lab.]

FMST 640/840 Topics in Film Genres: Repurposing Gender Media

Instructor: Rosanna Maule
Tuesday: 1:15pm-5:15pm

Repurposing denotes the reutilisation of existing media infrastructures or forms. Historically developed in late capitalism as the response to industry and corporate culture, repurposing has also been absorbed into the mainstream.
This seminar explores the multiple dimensions of repurposing as a feminist, queer, intersectional, and ecological approach to film and media. Its purpose is to trace the historical and conceptual manifestations of repurposing as an alternative media strategy by artists, activists, and fans, developed either individually or within independent and grassroots circuits and organizations of cinematic production, distribution, or circulation.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework including intersectional and decolonial media feminist theory, queer theory, affect theory, and political theory, the seminar will focus on feminist and LGBTQ-informed vidding and remix practices, memes, video, MTV, and music video reappropriations of popular culture, and archive-based films and videos.
Weekly screenings.

Combined MA/PhD Courses WINTER

FMST 632/832 Topics in National Cinemas: American Cinema of the 1950's

Instructor: Catherine Russell
Thursday 8:45-12:45

Hollywood in the 1950s was an industry in transition, even while it produced some of the strongest films of its history. With the rise of independent productions, the competition of TV, and major shifts in the social fabric, American cinema was dramatically changed during this decade. In this course we will examine the social and cultural climate of the HUAC trials and the Cold War, the civil rights movement, transformations of the urban environment, popular Freudianism, and censorship. Screenings will include examples of social problem films, revisionist Westerns, and film ‘gris’; readings will include analyses of race and gender within this transitional era and a variety of historiographic approaches to the period. Students will be required to do research projects and presentations.

FMST 635/835 Topics in Aesthetic Cultural Theory: Global Popular Film and Media

Instructor: Masha Salazkina
Monday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This course will give an overview of some of the key topics and methodologies that form part of transnational approaches to studying film and media. We will begin with the discussion of some of the key terms used in contemporary scholarship, moving on to the analysis of various forms of border-crossing in both, representation, and media practices. Emphasis will be placed on global popular media and cultural forms, and on informal modes of its production and circulation.

FMST 660/860 Topics in Film Directors: Comparative Style Analysis - Hitchcock and Welles

Instructor: John Locke
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm

This seminar examines the work of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Each week a film by Welles or Hitchcock is screened and then discussed using detailed analysis of video segments. The seminar is about the use of formal analysis to understand film style.
An additional aim of the close analysis of these films is to question familiar critical views about them. These films have been discussed so frequently in the literature that an effort needs to be made to break with the conventional views and look again at the films themselves.
The principal written work required is an essay about a particular Welles or Hitchcock film selected by the student at the beginning of the term. The student concentrates on this one film during the entire term.